Version Control for Government documents

"An article in Slate talks about the sneaky way a major change in the Patriot Act reauthorization bill was made by (possibly) a Congressional staffer without even his boss knowing about it. (The change increased the power of the Executive at the expense of the other two branches of government.) Now, I write software for a large and complex system containing millions of lines of code and I know that nobody could slip a single line of code into my project without my knowledge. This is because everything that goes into the build goes into a source control system, and email notification is generated to interested parties. This is for a body of work that affects perhaps a few hundred thousand people at most (our company and the combined population of all our customer organizations). Shouldn't the same process be applied to bills being debated in national legislatures that affect potentially hundreds of millions of people?

What a fantastic idea! Many version control systems allow external users to browse the repository history using a web browser (you can pull that trick on any Sourceforge project, for example try here). Free and open access to the history of a government's documents...

A ticket management system would allow the public to raise change requests against the documentation created by their government. By applying the techniques of open source development and blocking out the time wasters, could be en up with Open Source Government even?

Of course you can apply also the same methods to all the documents produced by your organisation (or family??).